Chapter 7

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They crawled slowly through the dense forest. Progress was slow but they had to be cautious, they were deep within the Lockbourne territory and getting caught simply was not an option.

The leader signaled with his hand and they paused. They saw some moment up ahead and one of the guys donned his IR goggles and scanned the woods. It was a deer, he paused and looked around if any predator was hunting it. All clear. He gave a thumbs up and they resumed their slow crawl.

They had been here for a while, carefully entering Montanan avoiding detection. Major packs had people working in airports and other transit companies to keep an eye on werewolf movement through their territories. Many others worked in law enforcements, giving them the needed authority to snoop on people without looking suspicious.

Patrick Lockbourne borders were well protected, this was a wealthy pack controlling a whole state and on top of that Patrick was first cousin to Gordon and was his man to the boot, so this whole package made Patrick a worthy opponent thus they were not taking any chances. They had slowly wormed their way in to Patrick's territory with utmost care and as they moved to the last one hundred miles of packs headquarters, it became even more difficult. Wolf patrols and forest rangers who were obviously werewolves. They had taken weeks to study the patrol patterns and lay out an infiltration plan.

It has been three days since they entered the core pack territory and were close to the pack lands, today they expected to hit the borders. They made it for another forty minutes and then paused as the lead position signaled a halt.

They group waited as the people in the front surveyed their surroundings. One of them signaled the group leader to come up front and he crawled over. The guy at the front simply handed him over a pair of binoculars and the group leader peered in.

What was this? This was not there in their intelligence. They were supposed to hit miles of forest before reaching the core pack lands where most of the senior pack members resided in a collective community but not this.

This was a makeshift house inside the forest, clearly in use and most concerning, very well guarded. Luckily all of them were sprayed with scent suppressors which was good at least for the next twelve hours otherwise a patrol would have picked up their scent.

The group leader considered his options, for this house to be well protected it must have someone important in it. This could be vital Intel, but this meant they should have to forego reaching the core territory. For him that was dead in the water anyways, they couldn't go ahead without them getting spotted and that meant they had to circle back and start over from a different route all over again.

Alternatively they could spend some time here and send back intelligence, making a choice he signaled his men to gather data on this unexpected finding.

His men quickly pulled out special cameras meant for spying and were deadly silent in operation. His men started clicking pictures, one of the men pulled up a wireless hotspot provided by a local telecom provider who promised a good coverage, he switched it on and waited, the red light on the device blinked for a minute while he waited in suspense and then turned green. Bingo! They had signal out here. The cameras were wireless ready and were already configured to the hotspot's network and settings on the cameras were enabled to upload pictures the moment they were taken, and just like that pictures by the team were getting uploaded on to a storage cloud. This way, even if they were caught and killed, information captured would be already available to the recipient.

As they were capturing pictures they saw some activity, few men came out of the house and huddled in to groups and lit up cigarettes. The men zoomed in their cameras and managed to capture most of their faces. The leader signaled to one more guy and he started gently digging the ground and in about thirty minutes managed to make one feet deep hole. He pulled out a cylindrical transponder, it would emit signals to be picked up by special devices and it had built in battery backup to last for a couple of months. If they wanted to find this place again it would be easy just by zeroing on to the transponder's signal.

It was promptly buried and covered back with earth and thoroughly disguised so people would not find the fresh activity on the ground.

They spent the next hour, taking pictures of anything that moved and promptly retreated.

***

"Sebastian wants us to throw the world in to chaos and Alex and Adrian wants us to roll over and play possum and I am desperately trying to find a middle path." Evelyn whispered.

All she got in response as usual was the beeping of the medical equipment. Max stayed still even though she hoped for a miracle.

"I don't know what to do Max" she confessed "I know we need to do something and something soon, things are moving fast and falling apart. I kind of agree with Sebastian to a certain degree at least, right now we look so weak that it is almost tempting for folks to take us out. So we need to do something about it. Alex does not see past the girl from Colorado, maybe that is me, maybe I am not meant to do what I am doing and quite honestly I am terrified of doing anything, what if I do something and it makes matters worst? What if the damage I do cannot be undone? This is such a mess, I am in such a mess, not fair Max, leaving me to all this...not fair! You know I am going to be so pissed at you when you wake up right?" She was holding his hand and sitting next to his bed.

She just sighed as she put her hear out to Max. This was one more ritual she developed, every day she would narrate her day to him and voice out her fears. It made her feel better, hoped that he was hearing her and at this point he was the only one she could he herself. She hoped when Max woke up he would tell her that he heard everything. It was foolish, the doctors told her that it was not possible but the one reason she did this was because being close to her mate gave her relative peace.

Every moment of the elusive free time she had she spent it with him, she also fell asleep in this room most of the times. Otherwise Sebastian was keeping her extremely busy. She was still over her head, the responsibility of being Roma were far and wide she really wondered how the old one managed it without falling apart, she really admired her the way she made it seem effortless or the grace she had carried herself with, compared to her Evelyn felt like a fraud and a mere shadow and she suspected many looked at her that way. A weak Roma! Alex her own friend has made that clear in not so many words. If the people she know placed no hope on her what chance did she have to convince the rest? The only exception was Sebastian who constantly pushed her to her limits.

Sebastian had scared her a little in the beginning with his relentlessness but as she spent time for with him, her respect and admiration grew, she understood why everyone looked up to that wolf. He had a drive and zeal in him that would not die down and cover in face of adversity, he was smart and cunning to the boot. He had clearly loved the old Roma as a mother and grieved her loss in his own way, he was Max as a younger brother whom he failed to protect. He had made a promise to the dying Roma and he would die fulfilling that promise and every day she could see that unwavering determination in him, some of it could not help but rub off on her. This was their purpose he told her every day and she could not help but start believing him. Even though she was not comfortable with what he was proposing, she could not help admire him for his convictions. She was simply afraid that she would end up bending to his sheer force of a will and doing something she did not want to do in the first place.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door and as she looked towards it a guard opened it and greeted her politely "Roma, Sebastian has been looking for you"

She nodded in acknowledgement and got up from her seat.

"He is waiting in your office" the guard added.

"Thank you" she responded and looked back at Max longingly, then took a deep breath and trekked back to the office.

As she walked in to the office she saw him sitting on his usual chair on the other side of her desk "You were looking for me?" she asked as she took her seat.

There was something off about him, he was unhinged.

"Is everything ok?" she asked concerned, leaning towards him.

"Remember I told you about men we sent in to Montanan to snoop around?"

"Yes" She nodded remembering. This was set in motion by the old Roma and Sebastian.

"Well, they sent some interesting intel back" he said and pulled out an stack of pictures and handed it over to her.

She looked through them one after the other and then paused as her eyes grew wide, she let the other pictures she was holding drop on to the table and her hand shacking clutched the one picture, it was a picture of a man smoking a cigarette, the picture was slightly grainy but it couldn't have been more clear to her.

"Charles!" she whispered and looked at Sebastian.

They had found the bastard!